This is the time when the major dictionaries disclose their “word of the year”. In 2016, two candidates were awarded this designation, namely, “surreal” and “post-truth”.
It is easy to say, as many media outlets have done, that the election of the Orange Man and the Brexit vote were surreal. But in truth they were not. Both reflected a kind of “backlash” politics, and given that so many people have been screwed by neoliberal governments for decades, there is absolutely nothing surreal about these two outcomes.
The only thing surreal about the US presidential election is the choice of the two candidates who contested the final vote– one a megalomaniacal chancer who looted his own “charitable” foundation to pay for portraits of himself, the other a craven opportunist with no deep convictions except for her entitlement to rule. Both are crooked and avaricious.
What is surreal, then, is how a country with so millions of highly talented and deeply compassionate people could not come up with alternatives to these two hideously flawed candidates. Yes, there was Sanders and Stein, but they never stood a chance. Moreover, both were problematic as candidates.
When it comes to “post-truth”, a clarification is needed. The “post-truther” is not the liar, or even the habitual liar. For as Harry G. Frankfurt points out in his well-known On Bullshit, the liar still exists in a relation to the truth, because he or she must negate or…